California leads nation in ‘minority-owned businesses’

This Mi Pueblo store in San Jose is designed to evoke memories of the Mexican state of Michoacan, where founder Juvenal Chavez was born.
Leora Romney
MCT

California – and particularly Los Angeles County – are leading the nation in non-Anglo business ownership, a new Census Bureau report says.

The bureau calls them “minority-owned businesses” but in California, Latinos are the largest single ethnic group and non-Latino whites are less than 40 percent of the population.

Nationally, there were 8 million minority-owned businesses in 2012, the bureau said, up from 5.8 million in 2007. The underlying surveys are conducted every five years.

California had, by far, the largest number of those businesses, 1.6 million, and its proportion of all businesses, 45.6 percent, trailed only Hawaii at 52.6 percent and the District of Columbia at 47.3 percent.

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Los Angeles, the state’s most populous county, led the nation with 631,218 minority-owned businesses – 55 percent of its total – and more than half were owned by Latinos. The county also led the nation in businesses owned by Asian-Americans, American Indians and Alaskan natives and was second in black-owned businesses behind Cook County, IL, which includes Chicago.

California also led the nation in businesses owned by women, 1.3 million, with Los Angeles the most of any county, 439,513. And California had more veteran-owned business than any other state, 252,377, with Los Angeles County topping the nation in that category as well.